The University Library’s Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) current exhibition is entitled Imagine! Painters and Poets of the New York School. The exhibition is part of the Syracuse Symposium, which for 2006/2007 has chosen imagination as its theme.

On display is material from the recently processed Grace Hartigan Papers, as well as from the University Art Collection, the Grove Press Archives, and SCRC’s extensive holdings of art and literary magazines from the 1950s. Grace Hartigan (1922–) was a major participant in the explosion of creative energy that was the New York artistic and literary scene of the early 1950s. An important abstract expressionist painter, Hartigan was included in the famous show Twelve Americans at the Museum of Modern Art in 1956. Her friends and correspondents included Frank O’Hara, Larry Rivers, Barbara Guest, and Joan Mitchell.

The exhibition is available weekdays, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. (excepting holidays) until December 15, 2006, after which time it will travel to the Palitz Gallery at the Joseph I. Lubin House in New York City.

Passwords: Bill Berkson on Frank O’Hara
Tuesday, November 28, 7:00 p.m.
Poets House, 72 Spring Street, Second floor

Poet Bill Berkson explores the life and work of O’Hara (1926-1986) in the year 1956, at the time of his thirtieth birthday, when he was preparing the manuscript of his first major collection, Meditations in an Emergency.

Bill Berkson is a poet, critic, teacher and sometime curator, who is the author of sixteen books and pamphlets of poetry, including the recent collections Serenade and Fugue State. During the 1960s he collaborated with Frank O’Hara on Hymns of St. Bridget & Other Writings. He teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Tickets ($7; free to members of Poet’s House, the Poetry Project, and MoMA) are available at the door on the evening of the program. For more information please call (212) 431-7920.

Frank O’Hara Reading
Wednesday, November 29, 8:00 p.m.
The Poetry Project, St. Mark’s Church, 131 East 10 Street, at Second Avenue

With Bill Berkson, Anselm Berrigan, CA Conrad, Bob Holman, Patricia Spears Jones, Kimberly Lyons, Eileen Myles, Ron Padgett, David Shapiro, Lytle Shaw, John Yau, and others

Tickets ($8; $7students and seniors; $5 MoMA members; free to Members of Poet's House and the Poetry Project) are available at the door on the evening of the program. For more information, please call (212) 674-0910.

Frank O’Hara at MoMA
Thursday, November 30, 6:00 p.m.
The Celeste Bartos Theater and MoMA Library and Archives Reading Rooms
The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building
4 West 54 Street

Frank O'Hara worked at The Museum of Modern Art on and off for fifteen years—first selling postcards, then curating exhibitions, writing catalogue copy, and composing poems during his lunch hour. This program features poets John Ashbery and Bill Berkson, artist Alfred Leslie, and Museum Archivist Michelle Elligott as they share their memories of O'Hara and his love for poetry and art during his time at MoMA. Selected archival material from the Frank O'Hara Papers, such as correspondence, handwritten notes, and installation photographs, and printed materials such as illustrated books of poetry and exhibition catalogues, will be on view in the Library and Archives's new Reading Rooms.

Tickets ($10, MoMA, Poets House, and Poetry Project members $8, students and seniors $5)  can be purchased at the lobby information desk and the Film and Media desk, or online at www.ticketweb.com.